Identical-machines scheduling is an optimization problem in computer science and operations research. We are given n jobs J1, J2, ..., Jn of varying processing times, which need to be scheduled on m identical machines, such that a certain objective function is optimized, for example, the makespan is minimized.
Identical machine scheduling is a special case of uniform machine scheduling, which is itself a special case of optimal job scheduling. In the general case, the processing time of each job may be different on different machines; in the case of identical machine scheduling, the processing time of each job is the same on each machine. Therefore, identical machine scheduling is equivalent to multiway number partitioning. A special case of identical machine scheduling is single-machine scheduling.
